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February 10, 2015

You are invited to join our series of free Webinars. These are technical discussions hosted by the Autodesk Product Support team and brought to you by Subscription Services. The basic format is a 20 - 40 min period of in-depth topic discussion with questions fielded during the presentation, where the remainder of the hour is an open question & answer period covering any topics of interest by the audience. Please note that this is a webinar series, and after signing up you will be notified of all future Build Your AutoCAD IQ events.

October 15, 2014

Please be cautious if you are intending to upgrade to the new MAC OS and are using AutoCAD for MAC. AutoCAD for Mac 2015 is compatible with Mac OSX Yosemite (10.10). AutoCAD for Mac versions 2014 and earlier currently are not compatible with Mac OSX Yosemite (10.10). These versions may launch, but will not operate properly and damage to your project data could occur.

May 23, 2014

Would you like to be a part of the team that gets to Beta test AutoCAD and help shape what future releases look like?

In response to the customer feedback for 2015 products, the AutoCAD team is working on the Service Pack to address some of the items customers are reporting. If you would like to get an early preview of this Service Pack, please sign up with our beta site here.

Additionally, if you would like to be a part of the group that gets full releases of AutoCAD early, you can do that here.

November 12, 2013

For those attending, I wanted to promote the classes I am teaching, as well as one of my colleagues classes.

1) AutoCAD support clinic. This is a class where you can attend and meet several members of the Autodesk support team. This is meant as a Q&A session where you can bring real issues you are facing at your office and let us help you. Many AU classes focus on one subject only, which is great in order to learn that subject or program. This class though, let's you come to us with anything at all you want to learn about or find troubleshooting tips on. This class is being held on Wednesday at 8:00 am of the conference week. The session number for this class is AC1512.

2) There is also a Support Clinic roundtable session. This is similar to the class above, but is a much smaller class so those attending have more time to discuss their questions in depth. With a smaller class, it is easier to dedicate a longer period of time and really help you come up with solutions to your CAD questions. This class is being held Tuesday afternoon at 3:00 during the conference week. The session number for this class is AC1515-R

3) My colleague Volker is teaching a class about CUIx as well. In Volker's own words, this class description is: "The ability to tailor the menu system in Autodesk AutoCAD software to automate commands or to create a personal workspace has always been the product's forte. Back in the day, we could easily modify the menu system with a text editor. Things change. The AutoCAD Custom User Interface File (CUIX) is a tad more complex and can be daunting to even a seasoned AutoCAD veteran. In this class, you learn how to add commands to AutoCAD, creating new tabs and panels for your workspace. You learn to add a custom partial menu to the main customization file and how to incorporate the enterprise CUIX." The session number for this class is AC3274

It would be great to meet any readers of this site that are attending. Please seek me out, and we hope to see you there!!

December 05, 2011

Last week was Autodesk University 2011 and it was a great event. This was my 14th AU to attend and 13th AU where I was a speaker (16th if you count that year we did four AU events around the country). There is such great energy at AU and at times during the week it feels like that energy is the only thing keeping you from collapsing in complete exhaustion… which I am doing now.

This year I taught a class on managing Autodesk licenses called, "License and Registration, Please". It covered topics like cascade licensing, Online License Transfer, previous version and how to control your licensing with an options file. Thanks to everyone who attended (and don't forget to fill out your surveys).

My co-blogger, Silvia Menon, taught an excellent class titled, "First Aid for AutoCAD®: Troubleshooting Common Issues". Silvia ran through detailed troubleshooting steps and how to work with Product Support if you have an issue you can't resolve yourself. This was Silvia's first time to attend AU and her first AU as a speaker and she did an outstanding job. If you didn't catch her class, be sure and check it out when it comes online at the AU Web site.

One of the things I always look forward to at AU is getting to hang with AU friends: people that I only see once a year at Autodesk University. After 14 years of attending AU, I've developed so many good friendships with fellow speakers even though I only see them once a year. It was great to see you all again and I look forward to seeing you next year (dave, next year I'm going to sushi, no matter what).

Were you in attendance this year, either live or at one of the virtual AU sessions? Let me know how it was for you?

October 26, 2011

Starting around AutoCAD 2.1, the ability to customize AutoCAD using AutoLISP was one of the things that made AutoCAD so powerful. At that time, LISP was the preeminent language in the field of Artificial Intelligence and the addition of LISP to AutoCAD really opened doors to customizing and automating workflows. All of a sudden, you weren't stuck with only what AutoCAD could do "out of the box."

When I started working with AutoCAD, I remember spending countless hours on CompuServe (my ID was 71521,450), on my 300-baud modem, exchanging AutoLISP routines with other AutoCAD users. Although I had previously done some programming in Pascal, I would say that AutoLISP helped solidify my love of programming and it was surprisingly powerful.

In the early 90s I wrote and sold a commercial AutoCAD layer manager called Layer Express. Initially it was all written in AutoLISP and DCL. Eventually I started incorporating ADS (and later ARX) applications as supporting modules (to get more speed and better file system access), but the main Layer Express app was still 5000 lines of AutoLISP. During those years, I did consulting and created lots of custom, discipline-specific, applications for large companies and much of it was written in AutoLISP.

When I joined Autodesk I worked on the Express Tools team and the vast majority of the tools we created were written in AutoLISP. The developers I worked with (Randy, Frank, Dominic) were magicians at making AutoLISP do amazing stuff. The amount of tools we created during the short life of that team would have been far less were it not for that language. Although many Express Tools commands have since been folded into AutoCAD as ObjectARX apps, we still ship almost 80 AutoLISP files for the remaining, original, Express Tools.

So, if you're ever written a (setq) statement, marveled at what you could do with (mapcar '(lambda)), or otherwise leveraged the power of AutoLISP to make AutoCAD a bit more useful, take a moment to remember the passing of John McCarthy.